Antibiotic Misuse Is Rife in Urgent Care Centers

Despite proven harms of unnecessary antibiotic use, the battle to limit unnecessary prescriptions rages on. Hospitals and medical offices are not the only sites of frequent antibiotic abuse: Urgent care centers and retail clinics also contribute. Researchers used data from a nationwide claims database to correlate International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, (ICD-9) discharge diagnoses with receipt of oral antibiotics for more than 150 million outpatient visits made during 2014 by employed adults (age, <65).

Likelihood of antibiotic prescription was uniformly higher in urgent care centers than in hospital-associated emergency departments or medical offices. This held true for both diagnoses for which antibiotics generally are in…